


In My Solitude You Taunt Me (With Memories That Never Die)

by thegrumblingirl



Series: Why Don't You Save Me? (1 Million Celebration) [10]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, Companionable Snark, Curnow is the Private Eye, Exes, M/M, POV Geoff Curnow, Past Relationship(s), Pining, Regret, Thomas is the Femme Fatale, grumble is basically writing with the L.A. Noir narrator in her head
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23030695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrumblingirl/pseuds/thegrumblingirl
Summary: The city of Dunwall was no jealous lover. Her rivers were cold and dark no matter how high the sun stood in the sky. Whether night or day, Dunwall stood on the edge of the barrel of a gun. She let those she loved go when they slipped underneath the surface of the water, for there was no time for her to be jealous of death. Her people were much the same: love won and lost again was what everyone knew. They lived and died by the notion. The river took as many or few as the forgotten city underneath the cobblestone. Each year, some ventured into the catacombs; only a handful of entrances left, not yet collapsed. Some went to find themselves, some to forget; but none went to return as they were. Or to return at all.Geoff Curnow, P. I., read the sign on his door. He didn’t advertise in the Courier, or out on the billboards next to the hound pits and miracle cures. He didn’t have to. Clients found their way to his office when they were ready. He had no secretary, either. Which was why there was no-one to warn him when the door opened (a private eye really shouldn’t leave it unlocked in a town like this) and a man he hadn’t seen in three years walked inside.
Relationships: Geoff Curnow/Thomas (Dishonored), implied Corvo Attano/Daud/Jessamine Kaldwin
Series: Why Don't You Save Me? (1 Million Celebration) [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1479173
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	In My Solitude You Taunt Me (With Memories That Never Die)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThreeWhiskeyLunch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThreeWhiskeyLunch/gifts).



> To celebrate posting 1 MILLION words on this here AO3, I [gave away ten request slots](https://screwtheprinceimtakingthehorse.tumblr.com/post/187537485520/grumbles-1-million-give-away) (all gone now). This is #10 — for Whiskey.
> 
> Soundtrack: [Solitude](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lt4wjvTlXA).

The city of Dunwall was no jealous lover. Her rivers were cold and dark no matter how high the sun stood in the sky. Whether night or day, Dunwall stood on the edge of the barrel of a gun. She let those she loved go when they slipped underneath the surface of the water, for there was no time for her to be jealous of death. Her people were much the same: love won and lost again was what everyone knew. They lived and died by the notion. The river took as many or few as the forgotten city underneath the cobblestone. Each year, some ventured into the catacombs; only a handful of entrances left, not yet collapsed. Some went to find themselves, some to forget; but none went to return as they were. Or to return at all.

Geoff Curnow, P. I., read the sign on his door. He didn’t advertise in the _Courier_ , or out on the billboards next to the hound pits and miracle cures. He didn’t have to. Clients found their way to his office when they were ready. He had no secretary, either. Which was why there was no-one to warn him when the door opened (a private eye really shouldn’t leave it unlocked in a town like this) and a man he hadn’t seen in three years walked inside.

“Geoff.”

“Thomas.” The name caught in his throat.

“We need your help.” He’d barely changed at all. Only, he looked tired.

Geoff went to light a cigarette. An excuse to use his hands and lower his gaze and not resort to shuffling papers around on his desk.

“Fine.” Thomas sighed, a soft exhalation of familiarity and the frustration that it bred. Not yet contempt, but Curnow was content to give it time. “ _I_ need your help.”

“That going to make a difference?”

“You tell me.”

Curnow could never abide a reckless challenge.

*

“If _Daud_ cannot cover his ass, what makes you think I can?” _(What makes you think I will?)_ Thomas had stubbornly taken the seat opposite half an hour ago to begin his explanation, and Curnow had to repress the urge to pace up and down behind him, from the shelves and cabinets, the length of the room towards the windows.

“You’ve never turned anyone away who came through that door.”

“Been a long time since you saw anyone walk in here.” There’d been a time when they’d almost worked together, and it’d been as good a way of spending time with each other as watching the city from the roof, the sun low on the horizon and the smog turning the sky lilac. The slaughterhouses and refineries were just on the other shore, the Embankment separating the two beating hearts of Dunwall: whale oil, and coin. Rudshore lay to the East.

“Doesn’t feel that long since I knew what kind of man you were. And men like you don’t change.”

That much was true, if Curnow did like to flatter himself. Men like him didn’t bend to anyone else’s will, unless there was a clean death to be had in it. That was how men like him changed. They died. That was one of the reasons why they would have never worked out.

“What about men like you?” Curnow asked, reckless enough now himself.

“A man who’ll run from himself for too long to find out before it’s too late,” Thomas replied without missing a beat. “At least, that’s what you said when you asked me to leave.”

*

Curnow, to spite himself, had agreed to help Thomas, the Whalers — Daud — with their case. They needed something found, or perhaps some _one_ , and he was the only outsider they could trust. Or so Thomas said — Curnow believed that it may have more to do with him being expendable. The only outsider they could manipulate. The Whalers: the other reason. Thomas always went back to them. His heart lay with them. He would have never stayed. And Curnow had asked him to. Had looked at the empire Daud had built, and had asked Thomas to stay. Not for jealousy — everyone knew of the ill-fated affair Daud had had with the late mayor’s daughter and her handsome bodyguard; and everyone knew none of the three would ever quite recover from the heartbreak. But the danger… high voltage, a phrase that came to mind. Thomas had been there the night Daud had earned the scar that had precluded his budding romance; and Thomas had come back and gone again without so much as a word at the worry in Curnow’s heart.

It wasn’t the fear of a detective’s spouse waiting with the kids at home. It was the worry of a man knowing that the ways they led their lives would never go together. Daud had chosen to protect who he loved from what and who he was. Thomas had chosen to push through the threat because he saw himself not as someone with something to lose, but as his boss’ right hand. Geoff had asked him only once, to stay. Not to go back. Thomas had remained silent, and Geoff had told him to go instead. He hadn’t come back. Until that night.

Curnow had seriously considered saying no — he could have; could have told Thomas to leave, again, and made _sure_ that the next time he’d see him would be at the bottom of the river, one or both of them. If the chewed-up face of the dead man he was looking at now was any indication, before the month was out. Dutifully, he’d begun digging. Regrettably, Thomas had been right. He’d never turned anyone away who came to him looking for help. He was no assassin. Just a detective who used to be a cop. Lieutenant, then Captain. Until _that case_. One of the kind that could make or break any good man living in a bad place.

On his way to what he’d been tasked with finding, he found Ruth, Gladys, Rosemary — and Irving. Two were dead, one comatose, and the fourth was so frightened she wouldn’t open her door to anyone, least of all him. Curnow hated missing persons cases. Some were easy, like runaway teenagers or wives leaving their violent husbands. Well, they weren’t easy, but they were simple. Curnow helped them disappear and sold the husbands some story about how the river took people all the time, and sometimes they never came back up. The kids sometimes, too. After all, it wasn’t the husbands and parents that came to him. It was the battered wives, and the frightened children. That was why he didn’t turn people away.

*

“Have you found something?” Thomas answered the phone without asking who it was. Of course, the number he had given Curnow would be used for this purpose only.

“Three hookers and a dead guy. Well. At least one of the girls is also dead. I see High Overseer Campbell is still up to his old tricks.”

“Of course he is. He might be excommunicated, but that doesn’t mean what it used to. They don’t go in for the heretic’s brand anymore — which is sad, really.”

“The Abbey isn’t going to change its policies according to Daud’s political problems,” Curnow told him, unnecessarily. It was perhaps an ugly trait, he thought, that pettiness felt good and satisfying. He wondered whether Thomas still had the same opinions about his ties.

“We still need that book,” Thomas reminded him — too patiently for comfort; Curnow wasn’t sure whether he was being made fun of or whether Daud was truly desperate enough that Thomas used the tone he normally reserved for his boss when he was being particularly abrasive. (Thomas had never liked it when Geoff called Daud ‘difficult.’) If Thomas thought he had to be _nice_ to Curnow to make sure he’d continue searching…

Campbell himself wasn’t even the problem. Daud merely needed information about someone else, a woman called Delilah; information that only Campbell’s little black book of extortion could offer. The book hadn’t saved Campbell’s career and standing this time, exactly, but it was enough to keep him afloat just fine. And it would serve the Whalers well. Daud and his crew were far from the most righteous clients he had ever taken. But once he’d accepted a case, he didn’t back down from it.

“Good thing that I got a lead, then,” Geoff said generously. “Rosemary Pratchett, she’s still alive and hiding — badly. If I can find her, so can everyone who’s down on self-respect enough still to do Campbell’s dirty work.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Thomas said, and it sounded so condescendingly admonishing — precisely because he was sincere — that Curnow wanted to hang up with a good rattle of the receiver in its cradle.

“As I was saying,” he grated, “Rosemary Pratchett.”

“Any relation?”

“Distant,” Curnow confirmed. Somehow, the old Pratchett still made his fortune by canning and brining and pickling anything and everything that may have once had nutritional value. “I believe she was present for the murder of Gladys, and possibly Irving MacAllister. I know where she is, at least for now; the hard part is trying to get her to talk. Which she might not be willing to do before a brick comes through her apartment window.”

“And who might provide the brick, I wonder,” Thomas mused. Then, abruptly: “You should come to the Chamber. You’ve got more after three days than we could do in three weeks, and you know we rather pride ourselves on our… problem-solving abilities.”

“I know,” Curnow returned drily, doing his best not to lose focus to the invitation. He had never been to the Chamber — hell, he didn’t even like to go through Rudshore on a sunny day. That district reeked of money and the want for more of it at all costs. He’d never met Daud, either. Incongruously, it felt rather too much as though meeting Thomas’ father to plead for a blessing Curnow had never known how to ask for.

“I can’t come to the Chamber,” Curnow answered presently. “You know I can’t. If anyone recognises me going in—“

“You’ve crossed the threshold of many, more dubious, places.”

“And none of them belonged to your boss. I made sure of that.” Curnow had too many contacts in the City Watch still, and too many of them knew his face. Too many of them were watching Daud’s establishments to try and find a way in for an informant, or ways of turning one of his people. Curnow sighed. Reined it in. “Fine. But I’m not using the front door.”

“Tomorrow, at 11,” Thomas offered.

Of course it was all set up already. Curnow wondered whether he was really all that predictable.

*

Geoff arrived at the Chamber at 11am on the dot — not the front door. A Whaler dressed in the same sharp suit all of Daud’s people wore, a mark and a mask both, was waiting to let him in. Thomas had told him once that Daud liked to tease him about his ‘crush’ on the ‘brooding private detective.’ It staggered him that they were prone to such romanticism despite everything. Curnow knew that the Whalers did not see themselves shrouded in mystery. To them, it was all very simple. Money and blood were just means to an end. Secrecy, cloak and dagger, those were necessary. And with all that came absolute loyalty to Daud.

‘You cannot do honest work with the Outsider’s hands,’ his mother used to say. Curnow wondered what Daud’s mother used to tell him before he went to sleep at night — what he now passed on to his people. The name alone… such an antiquated reference, even though the practice and the slaughterhouses still remained. Gristol could not have given up on the exploitation of whale oil. It didn’t want to.

“Curnow,” Daud greeted him when he was shown into a room on the third floor. “So good to finally meet you.” His manner was gruff and bemused, as if knowing something Thomas, standing next to him and looking as uncomfortable as Curnow felt, did not. Through the open door, down the hall, Curnow watched some of the Whalers moving around each other as if on autopilot while, of all things, preparing lunch, by the looks of it. The domesticity of it was grounding and bizarre simultaneously, absurdly peaceful for a gang of hardened criminals. He’d never understood the bond that always drew Thomas back here. Perhaps because he’d never tried to.

Thomas brushed their arms together on his way to closing the door, cutting off Curnow’s line of sight into this part of his life. Curnow turned his head to watch him over his shoulder.

*

The next day, Curnow spent hours watching the place where Campbell had holed up for the past months. Nothing — of the man himself, at least.

He returned to his office just after dark. His apartment lay two floors above, but he decided not head upstairs just yet. He had reports to write and recollections to note down before they faded. He’d just finished his protocol when there was knock on the door.

“Come in.”

It was Thomas.

“An unexpected visit,” Curnow said lowly. “And how kind of you to knock this time.”

Thomas closed the door behind himself. “You still keep hat bottom-shelf whiskey in your desk?” he asked without preamble.

“Bottom shelf, top drawer. Help yourself.” Curnow turned from the filing cabinet behind the desk, but didn’t sit back down. Thomas rounded the desk and came to stand three feet away from him, leaning his hip against the top. He wasn’t reaching for the whiskey.

“You ain’t here for a drink,” Curnow observed.

“No,” Thomas returned — too easily. He had always been the more earnest one. Curnow could be forthright, but Thomas was… comfortable, like this. Taking risks. The one time Curnow had tried his hand at it, it’d bitten him in the ass. Right here. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

“That’s a bad idea,” he rumbled. “I don’t do bad ideas.”

“I know,” Thomas said, recklessly still. And then, he closed the distance between them until they were _almost_ kissing. “But once upon a time you told me I was your favourite bad idea.”

And with that, he kissed him.

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU to everyone who's sent in a prompt for this celebration. I'll upload the ebook version of this today and send y'all an advance copy <3
> 
> @ everyone else <3<3<3<3<3 thank you all for reading, this and all my other nonsense!!!!!!!!!!


End file.
